


Nine Stages of Freedom

by ZenzaNightwing



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Prequel Trilogy, Star Wars: The Clone Wars (2008) - All Media Types
Genre: F/M, How Do I Tag, Tatooine Slave Culture, That's Not How The Force Works, probably
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-06-08
Updated: 2018-06-08
Packaged: 2019-05-19 13:35:09
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 7,614
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14874719
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ZenzaNightwing/pseuds/ZenzaNightwing
Summary: Here is a truth that a child knows: He will never be free from the first moment he breathes.Here is the truth that a queen knows: The world is not fair.Here is what a twice-traitor all-savior knows: Darkness is what he will always know.There are truths in the deserts and oceans and cities. They all find their own ways of interpreting them.





	Nine Stages of Freedom

 

 

Here is a truth that the sands know: Freedom is a thing of the soul, not of the body.

 

It echoes with every word spoken in raspy, soft tones in alleys, murmured into ears, on knees in front of the wild expanses of breathless, beckoning freedom. It screams from symbols painted on graffitied walls, tattoos hidden beneath clothes and hair and their banality, in a brush that turns into words that can mean the oceans. It is said beneath the watchful eyes of the Hutts and their brood, with the caress of eyes and the smallest twitch in expression, with a heavy exhale and a hand skimming over a scar.

 

Freedom doesn't mean a thing to the heavy stone buildings and blasters that wait in every place that deserves the name of place. Freedom is not supposed to exist, and you don't even need the chains and chips to prove that, all you need is a glance and you will see cities built on broken bones and breaking more every day.

 

Freedom lies beyond the dunes, beyond where the horizon stretches, in the arms of the Twins. It is where the sands are not the constant dusty haze as the towns but the only thing. Twin seas of stars and sand that cradle you into the oblivion with the watchful eyes of the gods staring down.

 

When off-worlders come with their painful naivete or seamless apathy, they look but do not see. They see order, they see little bastions of peace and security, where laws hold some weight so long as you don't mess with the wrong person, where there is water and light and food.

 

They do not see the wastes beyond, where there is water if you know how to find it and food if you know how to kill with a rock, and the laws of nature that bind every being to shifting surface of a burning planet.

 

There are only five creatures where the sands strip sanity from minds as easily as it does flesh from bone. Slaves, Slavers, the Apathetic, Hunters, and God-spirits.

 

Slaves speak in tongues and learn from their parents how to keep the desert in their skin from hurting those around them. They hear stories of the Jedi, who fought slavers back before they became shackled to another creature called the Republic, that everyone carefully doesn't call the second title but say it with their eyes, who learn even now how to use their deserts with weapons made from the light of suns. They paint symbols on walls and skins, and they smile when they walk out to the desert to die.

 

Slavers are the owners of beings, that claim them without knowing them, that tell them how to be people or creatures in the way they wish. They are called Master and they hold their Slaves' bodies captive, even though the souls remain their own. They puts exploding chips inside their Slaves and they know that when the desert has claimed that which they called property, they are not getting it back.

 

The Apathetic are the spacers that come and go with only a few footsteps that the sand eviscerates left behind in the wake of their plasma exhaust and the Freeborn that mutely do nothing. They look at the shifting sands and the bounty hunters and the pervasive smell of dust and blood and burnt plasma and they quietly go through their business and don't say a thing when they find a corpse in a junkyard.

 

Hunters are tools of the Slavers, but not Slaves. They aren't chipped and collared, but they are the most creature-like of all of the archetypes. They are a pack of feral hounds that will tear into one of their own with no mercy if it deviates from the pack's shared goals, will bury and burn and salt the earth as little credit chips clink into their savage, ever-hungry maws.

 

God-spirits are the Freeborn that quietly run surgeries in the back of their homes, the Slaves that burned themselves free in the desert, the creatures that come in the night and whisper tales of freedom in the ears of a people. They are as benevolent as an oasis, for one must never doubt that savage creatures lurk among them, ready to protect their young.

 

The Slaves and God-spirits are Children of the Sands, in the dark caves, in the screech of krayt dragons in the night, in the sandstorms that once claimed entire civilizations to be their victims.

 

The sands do not forget, they do not resist, they will never be tamed. They change with every gust of wind and stomp of feet yet they remain the same.

 

The Children are the sands.

 

They will let the desert take them when they are ready, and until then it will stay in their skins, locked away and hidden under the dunes, beneath the bedrock.

 

Freedom lies in the desert.

 

Freedom is in the soul, not the body, but let the desert claim your bones and you will be Free.

 

 

 

Here is a truth that a child knows: He will never be free from the first moment he breathes.

 

He greets the sunrise and the beat of his Master's wings and struggles to keep his desert down. He listens to his mother and she speaks of fear and loss and sneaks into the junkyard when their Master isn't watching them.

 

He listens to a girl who will be dead the next morning, who ran from the pleasure-house she was drafted into after being stolen off-world, who sobs to his mother and doesn't see him where he sits, struggling to keep the sands in his heart from tearing everything to pieces.

 

(“He said he loved me,” the girl says, hands fisted around her lekku in a way that must be painful, “He said he wanted to take me to Naboo and get married. That he was going to give me everything I could ever want. I _trusted_ him.”

 

“Sometimes people lie, _uli-a_. Especially when they say they love you.” His mother had said, with the wispy accent of the Children, “You cannot trust them when they say they'll give you everything you've ever wanted.”)

 

That night his mother smuggles her beyond the wall and he never sees her again. He hopes she's free. He dreams of blood in sand and glass staring at the stars and prays that her soul remains free on the sands.

 

He builds and breaks and wins and loses and thanks the dunes for allowing him a mother.

 

One day he sees someone so beautiful he thinks that she must be a God-spirit, one that whispers freedom and carries the Children of the Sand into the Great Mother's embrace. But then he looks at her and notices things, like how fine her clothing is, how bright-eyed and happy she is, and calls her an angel instead. Maybe she is a God-spirit, but she is not one from his home. She's too shiny.

 

There, he meets another, and feels something under his skin. It's not a desert, it's too small for that. He doesn't quite know what they are, but he's heard people talk about gardens before, and he thinks that maybe it's a bit like that. Plants, solidly rooted in soil that doesn't shift, doesn't change, weathers the howling wind without bending a single branch, echoing with life, necessitating it to survive.

 

His first thought is that it would die beautifully if he sought to live like the Children.

 

His second is that he feels starlight carried on his hip, and that he must be a Slave-Freer like the old tales.

 

And so he flies for them, for the God-spirit that must be seeking a home, and he _wins_. Enough for his freedom, and his mom's, enough to get them both on the ship of an Apathetic and into the stars that call to him.

 

Enough for the Freer and the Spirit to escape the dunes.

 

He wins his own freedom. Not because of his prize, no, that goes towards the lost God-spirit and her Slave-Freer companion, so that they can go on and free more of their people. He wins it because the Slave-Freer has bet his freedom on his life.

 

It feels like some strange sort of blasphemy, to do the work of the desert for itself, but he doesn't hesitate.

 

His mother looks at him and he feels his heart break when the Slave-Freer tells him that he doesn't have enough to free her too. But she only smiles and looks at him and he knows enough of the language of the Children that she says it's the will of the dunes.

 

And so he leaves. He leaves because he's going to become a Slave-Freer too, because he has seen the howling winds in his soul free the planet he called (hell) home for his entire life in his dreams, and they are never wrong.

 

He leaves, and there is another man with the stars on his side that comes to stop him. One with a creaking forest filled with walking corpses as his soul. There is another on the ship, with the weapon of the Twins hanging at his hip, and a soul like formless wind.

 

And then he hears the wind call the forest 'Master'.

 

He hasn't been freed, hasn't gone beyond the dunes, hasn't gained anything more than a loss of his mother.

 

He's just another Slave, calling another being Master, just another obedient piece in a twisting machine he doesn't know the name of anymore.

 

He goes to Coruscant and hears the Slaver call another Master and wonders if he is in the den of Hunters or in some sick, twisted mesh of Slave-Slavers.

 

He goes to Naboo and thinks of blood and glass and 'sometimes people lie' and makes scrap out of the sky with his desert thrumming through his bones, because otherwise it will rend him and the ground below into bleeding chunks.

 

The garden falls to the forest and the wind breaks the forest in half for it.

 

The wind looks at him like he's betrayed something, and so, the desert does what it always does when faced with gales and storms and the sibilant breeze that makes promises beyond horizons.

 

He shifts. He changes. He must.

 

In the end, he watches sparks flare into the sky, and thinks back to the days when he would stare at the stars and watch the plasma exhausts of ships taking off until his eyes grew heavy, wishing for once that he could be as free as to have the ability to not care.

 

“I am your Master now.” Says the wind, and the regret in his voice is quiet but still traceable.

 

All the desert can do is look around at all the landscapes, the swamps and citadels and tombs and arenas the other Slave-Slavers have made their souls and wonders at how many of them are so mass-produced in architecture.

 

“Come now.” The wind whispers later, takes his hand and leads him away from where the ash is settling, but the desert does not let itself be confused, doesn't ask why they aren't taking the ashes to scatter so that the Slave-Slaver can finally be free on the wind, on the waves or the sand.

 

He doesn't. It's not the place of a Slave to ask questions.

 

“Yes, Master.” he says, and the deserts are tamed and boiling.

 

Master is a Slave word.

 

Anakin has never been Free.

 

 

 

Here is the truth that a queen knows: The world is not fair.

 

Oh, she would love it to be fair, would love if everyone got their just desserts and everything was simple and peaceful and wars would only be fought by oppressed peoples against their corrupted governments, rather than corrupted governments bankrolling wars.

 

She is elected to be queen at fourteen because her people have had peace for so long they require new entertainment in the form of a crown on a child's head and an elaborate ceremony to perpetuate royal gossip from women going through puberty.

 

She is elected, and crowned, and then her people are blockaded.

 

She wonders if this is what the tales from her mother meant, of the god of war using peacemakers as his champions. She wonders this as she flees the planet and enters the realm of the stars, distant behemoths glowing like a thousand more hungry eyes watching her, like a being on a pedestal.

 

She meets a young boy, not as a queen, but as a young girl in her own right, and can only watch and barely reply in stutters to him calling her an angel, can almost see a mystic disappointment in his eyes, like she's failed a test.

 

She leaves behind a woman who has now lost her son to the hungry arms of the Jedi Order to be owned on the surface of a planet that doesn't care for her in the slightest. There's a distant hope, an almost obligatory, horrible thing in her mind that tells her that they'll come back and free her and take down the Hutt slave trade, because that is Republic space and they have to, she doesn't need to tell them right? It should be simple-

 

But it's not. And she doesn't say anything anyway.

 

Because the world is not fair, and she knows this.

 

And so after a battle, after a thousand funerals and countless pyres lit, she walks up the steps to her palace-prison, and puts her ~~shackles~~ crown on.

 

She looks down on her people, eager to watch her succeed, hungering to watch her fail, and rules.

 

She puts on her makeup and does up her hair, and smiles, and waves, and plots.

 

She knows that she is being ridiculous, in looking at all of this ceremony and seeing in like a prison, like it will suffocate her and swallow her whole, that there is so much more suffering out there that she could fix, if they would only just _listen_ instead of having her be the puppet monarch of her hundred advisors.

 

She knows that she is privileged in this high space above everyone else, and it chafes at her, because how can she have all of this power inherent to her position but be so powerless at the same time?

 

The people claw at the skirts that took an hour to put on and arrange properly to amend the laws, to keep her in office for just one more term, and she closes her eyes and reminds herself that the world is not fair, and tyrants wait around the corner. If she stayed for just one more term, she would tear down tradition because this isn't working, because she can't do a thing, can only sing as sweetly and challenge those that follow her.

 

The world is not fair, she reminds herself, as she steps out from under the crown and bows to its new owner, as she smiles and takes a collar that she puts around her own neck and returns to the stage as a new player, as powerless as before, now drowned out in the ceaseless, empty noise.

 

She'll petition Coruscant, this den of demons, again for the thousandth time, will vote and abstain and waltz like a dancer in a play in this grand auditorium where words echo like tolls of bells announcing the death of royalty.

 

She looks in the mirror, and sees something broken and monstrous, face pale and hair dark with sweat, lips covered in blood from where she bit her tongue to keep from screaming everyone else awake, and will make herself beautiful again and leave the ship before it lands, just in case the dreams with the drumbeat of explosions and the _drip drip drip_ of water or blood echoing, a hymn of screams comes true with all of that breathless horror.

 

_Mirror, mirror, on the wall..._

 

It is not fair.

 

But Padme will try her hardest to make it so.

 

 

 

Here is a truth the songbird in her golden shackles and the Slave-Freer-Slaver knows: They love each other.

 

Maybe it's because they both feel innocent again when they stand next to each other, feel like children the universe has never wronged, like the past is nothing in the negative space between the two of them.

 

Maybe its that she wears white and blood with her hair up and only feels true when there is a blaster in her hands, when there is pain painting her in wild, bleeding colors that feel like they could sink into a thousand histories and remain imbedded there for as long as they need to.

 

Maybe its that he comes back carrying the body of something that is no longer his mother with the smell of blood and ozone on him, and he tells her that it only felt right when there were souls spilling out between his fingers.

 

Maybe, because in the end, her nightmare-dream comes true in the rhythms in the distance, in the falling tears people other than her shed, in the blood of Cord **é** on the landing pad, in the screaming of Jedi falling and Geonosians chattering excitedly as monsters approach where they've caged her.

 

They shouldn't have done that, really. They should know better. She alone will chain herself to her rock to be preyed upon by monsters, and no one else can put shackles on her wrists that she hasn't already locked and swallowed the key for.

 

Maybe, because in the end, his nightmare-dream comes true in the breathy, pained gasps of a woman breathing her last until there is only the distant grunts of Tuskens and his own traitorous heart still beating.

 

They killed a Child in the desert. They should have known better. The desert exacts vengeance for every Child taken before their time, before they have passed on their knowledge to their newest generation.

 

Maybe because he lifts back her veil with a hand that isn't his now, and when he kisses her, he tastes blood.

 

Maybe because she looks him in his eyes, in the bright blue that sometimes looks almost like amber when the sun hits them just right, and smiles.

 

Maybe, because when the bells of war toll, they kiss and part and go to be puppeteers in their separate arenas.

 

Maybe its because they look at each other and both see their twin monsters chafing in the bonds they have placed themselves in.

 

Maybe its a thousand things, but through all of the death and destruction and deception that keep them separate, they meet and they drink each other in, for one is starving herself so she can eat governments whole and the other has lived in a desert all his life and has never left thirst truly behind.

 

Their fingers link, and this is the truth that they know:

 

Life is not fair, and they are not free.

 

But they love, and it has to be enough for now.

 

 

 

Here is what a twice-traitor all-savior knows: Darkness is what he will always know.

 

It is there when he stares up at the ceiling of his creche barracks, long after the lights have gone out and they are supposed to be asleep and dreaming of the beauteous world. It is there and it creeps along his skin with oily tendrils, seconds away from crawling down his throat and roosting there until he can no longer breathe and it hatches unthinkable monsters from his words. Until he closes his eyes and lets himself bask in his own native darkness that makes small horrors when he says words he's heard all of his life.

 

It is there when his creche mate smiles and spits and pushes and pulls and bends and breaks and every bone in his body screams 'put him in his place' and there is nothing left to do but come at him in a flurry of bright, encompassing blue. It is there, past the reflections of the burning plasma he holds in his hands echoing in his irises, where the trained eye could catch the flashes of bright amber.

 

It is there, wrapping around him and robing him in promises as he flies from the only home he has ever been allowed to have and off to his permanent resting place, where he'll remain until he breathes his last, because for the first time his shadows have failed him. He asked everyone, with its unbroken smoothness making tiny monstrosities spilling from behind his lips, where the honest truth felt wrong and half-truths felt more like a home than any physical place, and he got nothing for it but pain.

 

It is there, as the promised home becomes a lie and he braids it into his hair, remembering the look that Xanatos had in his eyes before he ran, the same amber-tinted madness he sees in the mirror some days. He wonders if becoming a padawan is worth it if its built on lies, but he feels the cold hand of destiny clamp over his mouth and stifle his words whenever he's about to say it aloud.

 

It is there with the tears that come so close to streaming down in wild, annihilating waves as he turns his back on his only home and fights for a people he can barely even understand. Is it wrong, he wonders, in between the days of starving and burning and hurting and screaming his throat dry until his shadows fill the air around him, to feel this right when he kills someone? When he only feels like his heart is beating when he can hear the pounding of blaster fire?

 

It is there when a blonde duchess looks him in the eyes and speaks with the same shadows, with the insignificant behemoths made by the act of speech. He loves her, with all of his heart, loves her like the void loves the stars, but he feels like he would shrivel up and die if he lived like her, in her grueling, pacifistic ways. His heart would stop without this forever conflict he has enshrined in the deepest part of his soul. His darkness is much more vicious than hers.

 

It is there of a planet of blue skies and seas and green life choked off by the metal vultures in the sky, waiting for their chance to eat their fill. There in the depths of the ocean, hiding the predators that swallow predators whole, and it flexes out beautifully, a challenge with its own fangs, ready to shred and tear and rip. It is there in the wild, scared look in the eyes of a girl the others defer to far too easily.

 

It is there, in the heavy shadows on a planet of shifting dust, in the crevices of his mind, roosting and calling itself out of hiding the minute he is left in this horrific solitary silence. There as he stares at an impossible number, and it screams and pours from the man in red and black with horns ready to gore any that stand in his way.

 

It is buried deep within a child with a sky for eyes, who remains silent but watchful and always looks through everyone else, like they are tied with little strings that only he can see, and he wants to watch them all dance. It is buried deep enough that he has to stare too, has to scour away layers of sand that are engrained in the very being before the shadow runs and flees to where the dunes cast.

 

And it is there as the selfish beacon he had been chained to gets a hole seared straight through, and dies in his arms after he did the gods know what with the darkness he speaks like gospel.

 

But then he must pack it up. He must not forget himself. He is light as much as he is darkness, and he cannot afford to look into Yoda's eyes, as old and wizened as they are, as fractured and full of their unique brand of shadows as they have always been, and keep a last wish without boxing up the monster from his limbs, from his eyes and smile.

 

He must look this shadow child with scouring sand in every crevice of his mind, wreaking havoc to any that dare to enter without its blessing, in the eyes like summer ice and make a promise he knows he will not be able to fully accomplish.

 

Darkness follows him, after all, and he has enshrined it in conflict to keep it from eating him alive.

 

He'd feel bad to turn this child into another soldier like him if he didn't already see the haunted, hunted figure he cuts, pushing against walls with sharp elbows until he's practically imbedded himself in the building, in the crevices filled with shadows like a home.

 

There is a darkness imbedded in the temple, he finds. He thinks he has looked its host in the eyes while he adjusted its grip on a lightsaber. He thinks it loves him in a clinging, desperate way of a being finding a lonely home and making new creatures to love him in return.

 

There is darkness, but he clings to light with scrabbling fingers, holds onto it's smooth, sharpened edges by nothing but fingertips, for the sake of a child with sunlight and shadows, gold and black, glittering just below the surface.

 

There is another brand of darkness around Senator Amidala, all grown up now and ready to eat the skies whole, so close to the duchess but so different. She is shadows too, he realizes. Closer to the sunlight-son's brand of natural corruption, new and fresh and vicious and burning than the horrible, wise and ancient things that cling to him and his starcrossed, bleeding love.

 

It's there in the cold eyes of the Kaminoans, in the corners of their sterile facility of child soldiers. It reminds him much of the Jedi Order, really, with their slow, pleasing tones and hollow laughs and the children forced to grow into a weapon and a suit of armor before anything else.

 

He meets his Master's Master under stone and sand and blood spilt against the ground, looks at his weak, sputtering darkness, something that shifts and strains and dies with light. How crude and uncivilized. The fact that there is a Sith in the Republic isn't surprising, but one calling himself the Lord of the Sith can only mean one thing. His apprentice took the beacon in the dark, stole its light in a haze of red and a deep abyss. He will pay for that.

 

There is darkness in the sand and the sunlight and the monsters they face in a circle of cheering, screaming mindless drones, in the teeth and claws and hungry growls of the great beasts that come to kill and devour. There is a headache causing starburst of black, hungry shadows, like tissue ripped from the void, spasming and spilling inky black blood, when the children of the dead mercenary arrive, faceless and nameless and following orders thoughtlessly, even when they die for it.

 

He cannot kill his Master's Master, he finds. He could not bring the energy in himself, looking at the sad display of rampant, horrible humanity the man shows, to get even close to a killing blow. He wishes he did, however, when his sunlight-son with hope in his darkness falls to the ground next to him without a hand. He wishes death and nothing but chaos upon him, struggling up while the Master of his Master's Master tries his best and also can't bring it in himself to strike the merciful end against the creature of conflict before him.

 

His apprentice comes back to him with that hope resolutely stuck in the center of his darkness, a bright, guiding light, like lamplight spilling through the window of a home, surrounded by a raging sandstorm.

 

He put everything in one place to find it, with a candle bright and burning with fresh love in the center.

 

He can only hope that doesn't come back to bite him later.

 

And then-

 

Then.

 

They give him the title of General, put a lightsaber in his hand, and shove him out into the world to make war. To breed conflict, with winces on their faces and monsters churning in their hearts.

 

He has never felt as alive as he does with faceless enemies and allies – both coded and too young to know better – by him on the battlefield, with the hum of blasterfire and energy shields and firing cannons and swinging plasma and glorious battle.

 

He was born and bred for this. A peacemaker on the frontlines, speaking with monsters on his tongue fed by flying droid parts, fueled by the bloodshed at his back and the oil and blood slick battlefield before him.

 

He meets his starcrossed one again, and they both smile sharply and whisper sweet nothings then leave the other to the shadows, monsters in human form, bowing their heads to the god of war.

 

He meets the beacon killer, the void and crimson, and doesn't scream when he takes the gold and stars from him in a choked gasp and a lightsaber through the chest all over again.

 

And then-

 

Then.

 

The world ends.

 

And Obi-Wan watches it crumble and burn with a morbid fascination and darkness boxed up with the monster.

 

 

 

They are liars.

 

How dare they look into his eyes and say that he needs to find peace, that this attachment will corrupt him irreversibly, that he must ignore the times when he can snatch a precious few hours of sleep away from the cannon fire and hissing plasma, that even in those times of supposed peace he cannot outrun the screams of his wife, as bound to serve as him.

 

“There is no death. There is only the Force.”

 

Twins, he is so tired of hearing that, so sick of getting nothing but meaningless platitudes said in the calmest of tones, because they don't understand- can't understand-

 

She is the only good thing he has now. Pure, unbroken, standing beside him like a mirror. She is the only thread to sanity now, don't they know that? She has to stay safe, behind all of the Republic's forces, has to remain his light in a home he never had, has to stay and build it with him when he can finally put down his blade and mourn for every faceless slave-brother that died for him and the cause he championed.

 

He regrets that most of all, to stand before this sea of the faceless ones (Hunter-Slaves, Hunter-Slaves, they're yours now, _Slave-Slaver._ ) and issue orders he knows will kill them. They are children, and he didn't even give them the grace to die in the desert sands with dignity, could only feel the blaster bolts strike true and have the scream of rage get lodged somewhere in his chest for it.

 

He doesn't regret Obi-Wan. The desert will always follow the winds, and it is inevitable that they meet, in some grand cosmic sense. Unless the wind had fallen slack and unbound, had stopped in its tracks and dispersed into nothing, there would be no way they wouldn't meet. He has a shadow, sometimes, in the back of everything, one he has acknowledged forgotten and loved and hated in equal measures. It's not his constant sandstorm, with Padme as the light in the center, merely shadows playing from the brightest of lights held in a cage of fingers.

 

It's a solidarity nonetheless, to sit next to him covered in ash and blood and machine oil in their transports and feel the darknesses twining together, complimenting and creating and destroying each other in a comforting entropy.

 

He does not regret Ahsoka, doesn't think he could ever, with her solemn temple of bright orange sandstone glowing with celebration lights, the ways he could meet her eyes and see himself back in them, as scared and broken as he is too. The kind of quiet understanding only children of war could reach, all three of them with cups in hand, toasting silently to all of their dead, laying in bunks at night and twining invisible hands through walls.

 

She left.

 

She left and he hates her for it.

 

Not that she left him alone, reaching out for a phantom presence as broken as him in the night.

 

No.

 

She left him and all the other Slave-Slavers behind and for one second he almost envied her. Almost wished they had tried to pin the blame on him, to remove him from this Order he serves and give him the chance to cut it all away, all of the pain and hate and peace, to take the word Master from his tongue, to sever his other hand to get himself out of the chains he put himself into and melted them into his skin with the desert heat.

 

But then she is gone and he is shipped out two days later to kill like he is told to.

 

War is not hell.

 

Hell only wishes it could be as bad.

 

“There is no death. There is only the Force.”

 

Tell that to all the Hunter-Slaves who mourn those that fell to protect their brothers and their Slave-Slavers and their purpose and their Apathetic creators.

 

Tell that to the children of Ryloth who live in caves and feed off of scraps, nothing better than the animals they hunt with rocks because their parents are 'one with the Force'

 

Tell that to the families of 'collateral damage'.

 

He dares them.

 

There is death, and it is merciful only to those who get it. It is slow and fast and as vicious as a predator and as benevolent as a God-spirit.

 

Death is Death. The Force is the Force.

 

And he can only control the second.

 

He can't- can't let her die screaming, die suffering and pained.

 

Can't let this God-spirit leave him like the last.

 

Can't let that light go out and leave him in his own sandstorm, until he strips his own flesh from his bones.

 

He hates the Slave-Slavers he is beholden to, hates himself for being one. Is revolted every time some little one comes up to him and calls him 'Master' with such childish innocence(naivety) and he has to smile and answer to it without screaming.

 

They are too young to be stuck in this life, too small to be conscripted into this mercenary army, too little and alone to make this horrible choice to become a Slave-Slaver without anyone to give them any other choice.

 

He hates it all, wishes he could burn it all down, reset the score to zero, remake it and press every wish and whim into the fabric of reality until the galaxy is perfect and ordered and no one has to die for causes they never chose.

 

He wants to burn them all under the Twins, to have them face judgment out where there isn't even a horizon, just blue and orange and yellow and red and the fire. To walk as far as they can into a nothing until they get to know how it feels when their own skin rebels against them and burns them alive to the distant sounds of hymns.

 

He wants them all to know suffering and see if they will ignore the sand and Slaves.

 

But he cannot have that, he will never have that. The dream of freedom brought from his destroying sands was a lie, because his dreams are only so cruel as to let death come true.

 

All he has to do is make this one wrong, to keep it from becoming reality, to stay by her side even as the drums of war call him farther and farther away.

 

He has to save her.

 

He has to.

 

There's no other-

 

“Did you ever hear the Tragedy of Darth Plagueis the Wise?”

 

Oh.

 

Here is another Master. A Slaver unbound from his last.

 

Here is a choice. One he can make for himself.

 

Here is light. Here is darkness.

 

Here is “There is no death. There is only the Force.”

 

Here is “Through victory my chains are broken. The Force shall free me.”

 

(For Padme.)

 

(Always for her.)

 

The children will not have their will stolen from them, will never have their choices taken from them, he will not put them under another Slaver while they cannot will it otherwise.

 

Death is Death. The Force is the Force.

 

Since they cannot choose the second for themselves, he will give them the first.

 

He will give them peace.

 

Slave-Slavers will fall before him and he will give them the peace of the endless horizon.

 

He will give them fire.

 

He will take them all down as coldly and cleanly as he can, eyes as gold and crimson as the Twins.

 

He will give them freedom.

 

“The Force shall free me.”

 

So why does he still feel chained?

 

Padme runs to him with wild abandon, managing to make a grief filled tackle look graceful. She is so very bright, glowing with light and the Force, eyes misty with partially shed tears.

 

But then she starts speaking of the lesser darkness and he could never understand never-

 

He is a Slave-Slaver, a General, and he has never known anything other than this war he has been conscripted into ever since he was small, with a light in hand like the myths of shape changing foxes out where the sands blow cold.

 

He could never understand why he gave them their peace, their freedom. He doesn't know of the dunes and blood and the _bangbangbang_ sound of a group of slaves walking single file out of range of their transmitter chips.

 

So why does she believe the lesser darkness more than him?

 

He would never hurt his children, would never force them to choose one over another. He is not a monster. He grew up where the stories of monsters underneath the black-sky days are less scary than the days when the Twins are bright and burning high above and Hunters lurk in every corner. He will not make them live with that fear, the kind that makes his heart race every time he sees a Hunter-Slave just because they wear armor of the same make.

 

He would never-

 

“Come back!” She screams, desperation flowing out into the air like a poisonous gas, and he feels something dark and heavy settle in his mind, a restless beast in a moment of perfect stillness before it pounces.

 

“I love you!”

 

And for one second, there is a crying Twi'lekki girl spilling her guts to a woman who would die in pain out in the sands, freed and trapped.

 

_He said he loved me._

 

Her eyes are bright and glowing and perfect, almost too perfect. She glows like an angel. Not like a God-spirit.

 

_He said he wanted to take me to Naboo and get married._

 

The wedding ring is on her hand, the hand that's reaching out to clutch at his sleeve like she can stop him from disappearing, like she could hold on tight to the ghost of a child that has never been free.

 

_People lie uli-a._

 

She glows, but it is not because she is the holy artifact he made her into, but because the child she carries is a supernova that will destroy her to be born.

 

_Especially when they say they love you._

 

She says it like a last word. Like his mother in a Tusken Raider tent, with the ancient wisdom of the sands trapped in those feverish, glowing orbs, skin hot and bloodied.

 

_You cannot trust them when they say they'll give you everything you've ever wanted._

 

She gave him everything. Love, home, peace, pleasure. She was perfect, like a facsimile of an ideal, bright and happy and _everything_ he could ever need, his one light and-

 

And it feels cloying. Feels nauseating. Feels like _there is no death only the Force_.

 

And there is Obi-Wan. The lesser darkness who will never understand, who burns like the fires around them, looking down at him with an expression of such broken pity that it makes him want to scream.

 

There are no gods of Tatooine. Only God-spirits and the mothers of creatures.

 

There are no gods, but if there were, he would be one. One of justice and vengeance, to strike out and silence those that took everything from him. To take down these false intruders within him sacred place, his throne lying empty when he went out to meet who he thought would be his queen and instead was just-

 

A songbird in a cage, singing pretty until it dies.

 

_There is no death-_

 

_The Force shall free me._

 

And within the sandstorm that he is, that blots out the Twins and gives harsh justice with grains that rip through beings and souls and minds, that little light in the untouched house goes out.

 

He reaches out a hand, and lets the Force free her.

 

 

 

When everything is done, all of his darkness spoken to the ripping heat of this place, and the only one he has left to care about left to burn on shores of obsidian glass, he stands vigil over a woman that will die.

 

Yes, Anakin is dead. It doesn't matter if the creature in his body lives, the one he once knew is gone, that sat with him on campaigns and made the screams and blast shells in the night just this side of bearable.

 

Darth Vader may survive, may live off of his hatred like Maul did when he was split in half, live to survive another day and take everything from him in a wash of crimson and dark voids.

 

He finds he cannot mourn. Not that he didn't care, but more because he cares too much. Like a distant voice he has followed all of his life is now in his ear, yelling and screaming at him to stay functional until he has reached a resting point, to fall apart once all of his deeds of plasma and blood have been completed.

 

There is an ache in the Force now, but for the life of him, he cannot tell what it is. If it is the pain of some great burden finally lifted or some phantom limb screaming out.

 

Yes indeed, this was balance. This was whatever the others had predicted when they spoke of a prophecy, of a _chosen one_. He really should have known, what with the darkness within him, the kind that has abandoned him now and gone to sleep on the ashy hills of a far-off Mustafar.

 

Balance.

 

How utterly useless it is now.

 

 

 

Here is a truth the void knows: it is pain and agony and it will never cease.

 

There are no Slaves or Slavers in this red-tinted world it has been placed in since it burned alive and rose from the ashes without any light. There is only a Master. Only a cause.

 

(It forgets if it chose its cause. It can't remember why it would matter.)

 

It has been in pain since it woke from its sleep, from the nightmares of the word _love_ said in three different tones, each meaning another, each as bitter as the last. It finds it doesn't dream anymore and it thinks _good, I cannot see another death become real_ and then forgets why it thought that anyway.

 

It is a weapon, nothing more. A tool to be used then reshaped, with a blade that glows an even harsher crimson than it is used to seeing through the two red spheres.

 

It is a sandstorm. It remembers once there was a house there, in the center of it, in the eye of the storm, with a light that glowed from the window and beckoned, holding every good thing within a space it once thought would never go dark.

 

(It did, and now it can't find it again.)

 

Now it just destroys, set on an enemy and told to kill and does so without hesitation. It is an animal without a collar, a beast without a cage, ready to bite and claw and kill to take whatever it needs.

 

It hurts sometimes in ways that seem strange, not the burning where fragile skin meets prosthetic or the ache that comes from holding up a massive frame but rather a hollow sensation, a creeping infestation in the sand that feels like guilt. Like heartbreak.

 

It doesn't have a heart anymore. It's synthetic.

 

Sometimes something will catch its eye, a distant flash of blue and white montrails that makes a light in the sandstorm gutter with spark before fading out.

 

Sometimes there are times when some distant, painful memory flashes and for one excruciating second it is a he again, screaming and destroying.

 

Sometimes.

 

For right now there is another one of Master's sycophants that stares it down imperiously.

 

“Lord Va-”

 

_**Darth.** _

 

“I'm sorry?”

 

_**I Am Darth Vader.** _

 

 

 

_I am a person, and my name is Anakin!_

 

 

 

_Call me... Ben._

 

 

 

_My name is Luke Skywalker and I'm here to rescue you!_

 

 

 

_That's Princess Organa to you, nerfherder!_

 

 

 

It is said that the deserts sometimes speak. With the sounds of slave transmitters and blaster fire and the wails of infants. With ancient names and forgotten tales.

 

It is said they say this:

 

Freedom lies in the soul, and in the name. Do not forget you have one of your own.

 

**Author's Note:**

> Creative liberties are fun.
> 
> Also I didn't really edit this so please tell me if I had any typos.
> 
> Please comment if you can. Then I will have UNLLLLLIIMMITTED POOWEEERRR.


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